Muay Thai and standing on the balls of the feet.

For a while I've been standing flat footed in the front with my back heel up a little. I recently sparred with some people on campus who said I should be on both the balls of my feet for better mobility, but this seems a little awkward to me. Is it better this way, or the way I was originally standing?

Well in boxing you stand and pivot on the balls of your feet. You do this for mobility and power, as you pivot on punches like crosses, hooks, and upper cuts. I believe the same goes for kickboxing, as I was taught to use a modified boxing stance for kickboxing.

Knees bent, hip forward, sitting back....it'll bring the heels up of the ground and get you on the balls of your feet. As feral said you don't want to be on your tiptoes and you never want to plant your heel, but your partner is right to a degree. It really is dependent upon your fighting style.

yeah, heels up and most of your weight on the back foot is how I feel most mobile. I think a very important part of this that people don't think about is back posture. Keeping your back nice and straight and in line with your rear leg really helps with mobility and being able to flow with punches and kicks.

Keeping the weight off the front foot helps one check and return kicks easily too. A lot of thai guys will just bounce their fuckin front foot up and down the whole match so their opponents dont know when they're just doing it or when they're gonna throw a left leg kick.

It works food for them.

I tend to stand fairly flatfooted and evenly weighted on both feet myself just because i prefer to punch and if people wanna kick me I dont really care.

It really depends on what type of fighter you want to be. If you're strong for your weight then you can get away with being a tank and just taking kicks on the legs and countering with strong punches. If thats what you want to do then it helps to have weight on the front leg to help absorb kicks. If you're to light on the front foot then **** hitting that thigh will turn you around which puts you in a bad position and just looks ugly to judges.